1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to managing communications in a computer network, and more particularly, to a data management and distribution system for providing a virtual fully-connected network between processes running on the computers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The dramatic growth of network-based environments and the accompanying movement of organizations to client/server in distributed computing environments have created an intense need for tools and technologies that support the development and management of resources and applications in these environments. Dramatic improvements in connectivity and communications hardware have made distance between network components increasingly irrelevant. A large number of computers used today are connected to some form of network environment. Increasingly, these networks include heterogeneous components, including diverse hardware platforms and operating systems which, in turn, are often interconnected by more than one network protocol.
To take advantage of the network-based environment, software applications are being developed with a more distributed model in mind; that is, the software applications are broken up into distinct processes and run on different processors in the network enviroment. However, currently developed distributed applications which take full advantage of the business and technology opportunities of large heterogenous networks have been prohibitively costly and complex. The dilemma is that even though distributed applications are best suited for effectively utilizing networked environments, they are significantly more difficult to write than more traditional centralized applications. In addition to the applications specific portions of the software, developers must also deal with asynchronous data transfers, communications protocols, data consistency issues, detection and correction of communications errors, data queuing and other problems associated with transferring information between the independent pieces of the application. As an additional complication, managing the distributed applications once they have been developed is also quite difficult in a highly diverse network environment where a change in one component can have a dramatic ripple effect on many other elements in the network. As a result, in order to develop and manage distributed computing applications, companies typically must invest not only in the wide variety of software tools, but must also become dependent on a wide range of specialists who understand the low level intricacies of many different operating systems and network protocols. This often results in more time being spent on technical design issues, rather than business design issues, in the development of distributed applications.
To minimize the complexity, most existing distributed computing applications and tools are based upon the client/server model of distributed processing. The client/server model deals with the network complexities by accepting an up front design limitation which mandates a single connection between two processes. For example, FIG. 1A shows a "standard" client/server system, which contains a single server 100 and multiple clients 102, 104 and 106 interacting with the server 100. An example of such a system could be a large company which stores its inventory and customer databases on a high performance computer system acting as a data server which is accessed by various personal computers over the network. As seen from FIG. 1A, the server 100 is individually connected to each of the clients 102, 104 and 106.
A more complex system is shown in FIG. 1B. In this configuration, the database is distributed over multiple servers 110, 112 and 114, which interact with clients 102, 104 and 106. This configuration exists in a situation where data is collected at various different sites, or where one network from one company is interconnected to a different network in another company in order to electronically exchange information. Expanding the client/server system to contain multiple servers interacting with multiple clients, however, causes the complexity of the system to increase exponentially. The added complexity is due to the overhead involved in maintaining all the necessary connections. For example, a system which contains three servers connected to three clients must maintain a total of 11 connections. Even in a homogeneous environment where all the platforms are identical, each platform runs the same operating system, and only one network protocol is used, the complexity of large client/server configurations is immense. When the network becomes heterogeneous, the development and management problems become staggering.